A Short Trip Outside the Universe
by Constant Babble
Summary: Angel agrees to help the Doctor move "heavy things." The Doctor *may* have failed to mention that the universe that the "things" are on is about to explode, that the TARDIS isn't doing so hot to begin with, and that he definitely knows what Angel did last summer.
1. Part One

Hi all! This is part of our _Blood and Time _series (see our profile for more details). As with most of the early stories, this stands alone pretty well. If you don't mind assuming a few things, go on. Otherwise, here's what you need to know (or better still, go back and read the others):

1) Angel and the Doctor have met. Mostly the Doctor gets punched in the face, but they have a working, meaningful acquaintanceship going on right now.

2) Yes, "acquaintanceship" is a word.

3) The Doctor was there right after Conner was abducted.

4) For Angel, this is from around _Why We Fight_ in Season 5.

5) Don't ask when the Doctor is from. It will hurt your head. (After _The Doctor's Wife._)

**Part One**

"Just a short trip," the Doctor said.

Angel didn't think that this really made it any better. All the statement managed to do was convince him that the Doctor had no idea what the word "short" meant, as the word did not apply to what he had proposed in any way at all.

"A short trip outside the universe?" Angel repeated, not bothering to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

"Yup." The Doctor didn't seem to understand sarcasm, either.

"And you need me to…"

"Pick things up." At least the Doctor seemed to catch onto Angel's skeptical look. "Heavy things!" the Doctor added in a placating tone. "Possibly followed by some wiring."

_Wiring_. Angel wasn't good with technology. On his best day he might be able to access the messages on his phone, and the Doctor seemed to think he could help work on the most technologically advanced ship in the universe. He laughed.

"Listen," Angel said, "I don't think you noticed, but I've got a job now. I'm busy. I have…" He waved at the large office, the paperwork, Harmony sitting at the secretary desk outside the large window, "stuff."

The Doctor nodded at it all like he hadn't shown up two hours ago, been told to sit in the waiting area by Harmony, and actually done just that. He had apparently sat down without much of a fuss and then systematically gone through all of the magazines on the table. According to Harmony, he had spent the longest amount of time doing activities in the ten-year-old copy of _Highlights_.

"Yes," the Doctor agreed. "It all looks…dull." He said the last word with a level of disdain that was typically reserved for head lice and reality TV shows.

Angel folded his arms. Yes, it was dull. His To Do list from Harmony seemed to be the second best proof of Hell he'd ever experienced (the first being his actual trip to Hell). He couldn't justify any of this without saying, "Why, yes, it's obviously a terrible idea, but I'm _allowing_ myself to be slowly digested by this evil institution for a shot at destroying their evil, baby-eating leaders."

He wasn't going to say that. It would probably sound more impossible if spoken out loud. Izzerial wouldn't even agree to play racquetball with him.

The Doctor's look of disgust shifted to one of curiosity as he peered around the office again, like it was a part of a puzzle that he hadn't known he had to solve until just now.

_Here it comes,_ Angel thought. He doubted the Doctor would understand why he had taken the job; not when he couldn't explain his plans without giving them away to whatever spies were lurking in the corners, or the reasons around Connor that had gotten him into this mess. Not when he struggled every day to justify the sacrifice to himself. He could only imagine the scathing look he'd receive on hearing even a small portion of Angel's excuses.

Well, maybe not scathing, he admitted as the Doctor looked at him with worry in his expression. Of all of the faces the Doctor had worn, this one seemed least capable of sneering.

The Doctor seemed to have come to a conclusion of some sort. "How are you, Angel?" he asked.

Angel's arms tightened across his chest. "Great," he said, leaning casually back against his desk. "I'm the CEO now. I have a secretary and more cars than I know what to do with. It keeps me busy, but I think that I can really do some good here."

Angel knew the Doctor wouldn't buy it. His team didn't buy it. _Angel_ didn't buy it. The members of the Circle of the Black Thorn didn't buy that Angel thought he could do some good, either, but Angel was working on convincing them of his turn to the dark side, so that one kind of worked out in his favor.

The Doctor tucked his hands into the pockets of his tweed jacket. "I see," he said. Part of Angel cringed at the sound of disappointment. "That's…good. That you're doing good."

Angel clenched his jaw. The last thing he wanted was for the Doctor to stand there and not call him out on it. The Doctor did nothing if not call him out on everything he did and now he was just going to let it slide? It was probably some con to get him to tell the Doctor the truth. Well, he wasn't going to fall for that.

"Yes," he agreed.

The Doctor adjusted his bowtie and looked around the room again. "Right…"

Angel drew in a breath to heave a sigh. He paused. Something wasn't right.

Smell was always an odd sense for vampires. It was endlessly useful, but often neglected because it didn't work much unless he actively took the time to breathe. Angel, like many vampires, had worked breathing into his life for just that purpose. He had trained his body to continue the rhythm so that when a piece of information drifted past his nose he wouldn't miss it.

Angel had gotten relaxed about breathing since he started working at Wolfram & Hart. The consistent, monotone smell of cleaner and freshly printed paper in his office made the exercise less than rewarding. Of course, then he missed things, like how the Doctor was afraid.

No, he amended after taking another breath, nervous. Not the salty tang of real, overwhelming fear, but the lighter, more acidic smell of someone who had been anxious about something for so long that they probably didn't even notice how tense their muscles were any more.

The Doctor was inching toward the doors. "You're right. I can probably do it myself," he said with an indifferent shrug. "It'll just take a bit longer, but what do I have if not more time? I'm sorry to bother you, Angel."

The Doctor was at least three steps out of the office when Angel pushed away from his desk. "Wait," Angel called. "Doctor—" he paused there, not sure what he was going to say.

The Doctor looked back over his shoulder; his eyebrows raised and hope dancing behind his eyes.

"I have a meeting at four," Angel said. "We can be back by then, right?"

"I think I can manage that," the Doctor said, a sly smile tugging at the edge of his mouth.

"I'll get my coat."

"Just a short trip?" Angel scowled at the outfit the Doctor was trying to hand him. It looked like what people in the 60's thought people in the year 4000 would be wearing. Namely, a puffy, grey jumpsuit. "I don't have to breathe, Doctor. And I don't have a body temperature."

"Nope," the Doctor said, dropping the suit over a railing, which curled lazily around and dropped down a set of stairs to the next floor of the "wardrobe." The Doctor clearly didn't know what "wardrobe" meant, either, because this place was more like a department store if it had been arranged by 17th century librarians using the Dewey Decimal System. The Doctor jogged off into 114.30.S1145 (for 45th century retro, probably), calling out from the racks of clothes, "But you are squishy and full of liquids! When I say that where we're going is cold, I mean it's headed in the direction of absolute zero."

Angel ran a finger along the fabric of the suit. "Absolute zero?" he repeated.

"The point where molecules stop vibrating entirely," the Doctor explained, reappearing with another jumpsuit slung over his arm. "And then they stop existing. And then explode!"

Angel blinked. "So…cold then."

"Yes! Cold. We'll have to be long gone before that happens, but the suits should give us an extra half hour or so before our blood freezes and our limbs start snapping off." The Doctor paused in front of a rack of outfits made of so much pastel tulle that Angel couldn't sort out if they were dresses or skirts or just extra fabric, and beamed excitedly at Angel.

Angel decided that, in light of absolute zero, he didn't mind how puffy the jumpsuit looked after all. "Should I put it on now, then?"

"If you want to," the Doctor said, holding up his own jumpsuit and giving it an approving nod. Draping it over his arm again, the Doctor headed for the staircase that spiraled back up to the hallway of the TARDIS. "We'll go over a few things first. I don't normally make plans, but I think we should have one just in case everything works out the way it's supposed to."

Angel watched the Doctor disappear into the hallway above. "This is insane," he told himself. Even so, he slipped the suit on, zipping and velcroing in true '60s/4000s astronaut fashion. He felt ridiculous in it, even though there was no one else around to look ridiculous in front of (including himself, since he couldn't use a mirror to see his own ridiculousness).

Of course, everything involving the Doctor seemed to end up leaning in the direction of insane, like there was a sign on the door that said, "You must be this crazy to ride." Something about this felt crazier than normal, though. Angel had gotten very good at listening to his instincts over the years. His instincts poked at him now, informing him that the Doctor had answered all of his questions much too directly and without so much as a piece of information that could be useful.

The lights in the wardrobe suddenly dimmed. His instincts screamed.

Angel ran even as he told himself that he was a vampire and the lights going out should not be a reason to panic.

He stretched out a hand to catch the railing illuminated by the light pouring down from the hallway above, intending to swing his momentum around and up the stairs. His hand burned as he grabbed what should have been cool brass and he hissed in shock. He listened to his skin sizzle as he continued to use the railing to change his direction. A little pain was a good exchange for not losing his balance.

Angel ran the rest of the way up the stairs without touching the railing and came pelting out into the hallway at full tilt. His shoulder crashed into the wall on the far side of the hall as he spun around to look back at the stairwell.

Light glowed innocently inside the wardrobe.

Angel growled. What was wrong with this ship?

"What the _hell_ is your problem?" Angel shouted at the room, only feeling slightly stupid for shouting at a room (slightly more for doing it in his stupid puffy grey suit). He had never really been clear on exactly how sentient this ship was; _if _it was. It probably was. When he thought about it, he had caught the Doctor talking _to _it instead of _at _it on several occasions, but he wasn't sure if he was talking to the ship like one talked to a loyal guard dog, an old warhorse, a disobedient servant, a close friend, or a long-time lover.

Angel stepped forward cautiously and peered at the railing. An intricate design was etched in the brass. Angel leaned closer. Yes, he was right: tiny crosses were worked into the pattern.

Maybe, he thought, it was all of the above. It sounded right, but was an unsatisfactory answer. It lacked any sense of finality, and was so general that it added almost nothing to what he knew about Doctor or the ship. The cruel intentions that Angel always kept locked up whispered through the bars of their cage: Figuring out how the Doctor and the TARDIS were connected would allow him a much larger understanding of how the Doctor worked, and that knowledge would give him the power to take the Doctor apart.

Not that he had any plans of doing that. It was just an option. Angel sighed. No wonder the probably-psychic ship didn't like him. _If it helps,_ Angel thought as loudly as he could, _I don't actually act on most of the unpleasant thoughts that I have_.

And then he tried to quiet any thoughts of how he'd been purposefully digging himself into a morally grey hole in the name of infiltration.

"Coming?"

Angel managed to hide his startled jump as he turned to face the Doctor in the same motion. The Doctor was poking his head around a turn about twenty feet down the corridor. He was also now in a puffy grey suit, but looked much more at home in it than Angel felt in his.

"Uh," Angel looked between the Doctor and the brightly lit wardrobe a few times before slowly following the Doctor.

They emerged back in the console room a short time later (shorter than Angel remembered getting there, which seemed consistent with the other times Angel had been there), and the Doctor was already twirling around the console, pressing buttons and flipping levers with flourish and zest until he came to a sudden halt. His finger hovered over the small red button, both hesitantly and like he needed to wait for just the right second.

"We can't keep putting it off like this, dear," he murmured gently. Maybe he meant it for himself, or maybe the mind-of-its-own ship needed convincing—which Angel thought was downright unnerving. Yes, let's all go to the end of the universe in a vehicle that occasionally needs to be convinced to work. "This is the last time, I promise." The Doctor grinned at Angel, looking a little embarrassed at being caught talking to himself.

The Doctor stood up, clapping his hands together. "Wonderful!" he said, stepping away and opening his arms to Angel and his new puffy suit. "Just what we need. Now, come, comecomecome—" the Doctor beckoned and pointed at the screen. "This is what we're after."

Angel approached the screen and leaned in. "Junk?" he asked after a moment.

"Yes!" the Doctor agreed, nodding happily. He frowned a second later. "No!" he scolded. He adjusted his shoulders and tapped at the screen with an annoyed air. "It's in a junkyard and it's definitely used. But it's the only one available. Anywhere. And when I say, 'anywhere,' what I really mean is that it's not available anywhere, which is why we're going outside of the universe."

"Outside the universe," Angel repeated, trying not to let his voice crack. "You were serious about that part."

The Doctor's shoulders sagged. "_Yeah_." He rolled his eyes and marched away to the other side of the console grumbling, "If I'm going to have to explain everything twice, we're going to freeze before we grab anything."

"So you mean another dimension," Angel concluded, ignoring the comment.

"No," the Doctor said, taking a long stride away from the console and more into Angel's view. He paused oddly there, mulling something over for a few seconds before he picked up his train of thought again. "No, the TARDIS can't travel between dimensions. We're barely going to make it out of this one. Fortunately, it's very close. I just need to dump a few rooms to build up thrust."

It's impossible to go _outside_ the universe." Angel said, really hoping he could make it true by saying it. "You just mean to the very edge, right?" Not only did going outside the universe sound impossible, but also suicidal by association. What could exist outside the universe?

"Sure," the Doctor agreed shortly, like it was just easier to agree. "I mean, not at all, but close enough."

Angel eyed the Doctor with deep suspicion. He didn't like being patronized with lies, and wondered vaguely if they'd already left Wolfram & Hart. "Okay…" Angel said slowly. "Tell me one thing: How likely is it that we'll get back alive?"

Another odd pause as the Doctor prodded buttons thoughtfully. "Surprisingly good," the Doctor concluded. "But it's not guaranteed." One of his hands gripped the edge of the console. He sighed, suddenly looking very tired. "There are several pieces of this ship that are about to simply...break. I'm making this trip now because without them I'll be dead in the water. There could be some serious consequences if we break down on the way there or on the way back." He caught Angel's eyes for a moment, the seriousness of his statement settling in, and then he grinned and spun on his heel. "But! Ideally!" he called happily, tossing a few levers as he made his way around the console, "none of that will happen." He poked his head around the other side of the center column. "I can take you home if you want."

Angel glanced toward the door, where beyond it, if the building were even still out there, paperwork and meetings and his friends pretending right along with him that they were still doing good waited for him. And Spike.

"Hey, I said I'd help," Angel said quickly, shrugging away the hesitation. "Better get going."

"Yes! Wonderful!" The Doctor danced back into full view and then stopped in front of Angel and scolded very seriously. "No! Don't be ridiculous, Angel! I haven't gone over anything yet. It's not like we're going to have a lot of time once we get there."

Angel nearly felt dizzy from the constant mood swings. "Oh. Okay then-"

The Doctor didn't wait for him to finish that thought. He thwapped a finger against the picture on the screen and the whole thing switched to a series of pictures. "This," he said professionally, like a general outlining a plan to his troops, "is the full list of possible parts that we will find listed in order of importance."

The screen started to scroll down, the pictures moving upward and out of sight just after Angel had time to register what they looked like; not that more time would have helped with most of them. His mind was already labeling all of the parts in the pictures things like, "do-dad," "thing-a-ma-bob," and "thing that looks just like the last thing."

"So..." Angel said, watching the list go by with glazed eyes, "I'll let _you _find this stuff...and I'll just pick it up and put it in the— Do we have a cart or something?" He turned from the screen in time to see the Doctor dash off in response to that question.

Angel shrugged and looked back at the still-scrolling images, trying to employ his eidetic memory to the needed pieces while he waited.

A few minutes later, the Doctor wheeled in a red wagon that looked like it would be better suited for hauling children on hayrides than for hauling pieces of machinery. Angel briefly considered that—just as much as the red fenced sides—it was _how_ the Doctor pulled the cart that made it look like a hayride, with his big smile and skipping stride. A toolbox rattled in the bottom of the wagon.

"Here we are," the Doctor said cheerfully. "Had a good look?"

The list hadn't even reached the bottom. Angel opened his mouth to point this out, but the Doctor was already shouting, "Wonderful!" He twirled on the spot and slammed a lever into place, sending the whole ship tilting and jerking. "I never used that billiard room anyway!" He laughed and shoved another lever up. Angel grabbed onto the railing to keep his balance as the TARDIS tilted and rolled again. The Doctor danced around to the other side of the console and threw another lever. He planted his feet, grabbing the railing, and joined Angel in yelling (although in more excited tones) as they rocketed through space.

Everything stopped with a particularly loud _THRUM_ and a bell rang somberly from deep within the ship. Angel barely had time to take in the foreboding stillness that pressed in on them before the Doctor slammed a helmet over his head. It hissed and clicked into place and the Doctor shoved some gloves over Angel's hands before applying his own fishbowl helmet.

"Radio?" the Doctor's voice crackled in a speaker in Angel's helmet.

"Check," Angel said. He hadn't actually meant to say _Check_, as if they were in a space movie, but as everything else was so space-movie-ish, it just came out.

The Doctor snorted like he's said something funny. "Good, good," he said through the laughter. "You're a natural. I knew it."

They exited, the Doctor laughing at Angel's growls of protest at being laughed at, the TARDIS doors swinging partly closed behind them on their own.

Up on the console, the list of parts slid silently to its end, resting on a picture of a jar of deep blue liquid.

The TARDIS tolled mournfully again and the screen flashed red. The list of parts flickered to a diagram of the console, where a small box nestled in the underbelly of tubing was lit red in an otherwise black-and-white schematic. The red box flashed once, then twice, and again, like a straining heartbeat. There was a spark and a _pop _under the console, and the red-lit box on the screen sputtered in silent cries for help.


	2. Part Two

**Part Two**

Ships lay like skeletons in a mass grave everywhere Angel looked; some bare-boned, others still with carpets, decorations, and other disintegrating comforts rotting like flesh hanging from their skeletal remains. Some were half-buried, some buried others. What looked like a space station lay like a sideways city off to his left.

But beyond it, in the sky, was nothing.

Angel was somewhat used to nothing. He liked dark, empty rooms, and he felt comfortable in isolation. But this made his skin crawl and the hairs on the back of his neck stand. Nothingness, to him, had always contained _something_. But the nothingness beyond the junkyard that they stood in was so complete, the knowledge that he and the Doctor were entirely alone felt more solid than the knowledge that he was CEO of Wolfram & Hart.

Angel suppressed a shiver.

The Doctor scampered back into the TARDIS, apparently untouched by the nothing. Perhaps his constant movement created his own universe to operate in. The more Angel thought about that, the more correct it seemed. If the Doctor actually traveled within a universe of his own making, that would explain why nothing ever made sense when he was around.

"Here we go," his voice said through the radio. He popped back out of the TARDIS, the red wagon bumping against the doors as he dragged it out. He pressed the handle into Angel's hand and then gave Angel an encouraging smile and a thumbs up.

Angel returned the expression with a dubious one of his own. "So how much of that list are you expecting to find?" Looking from the wagon out at the expanse of jumbled ships, Angel started to wonder how much scouring they would have to do for even one of the parts the Doctor needed.

"Oh..." The Doctor said, his hands pressed against his hips as he looked out at the expanse, but with much more hope than Angel. "As much as possible," he said, jumping into action. "Come on!"

He set off at a jog, Angel following him over the piles of rubbish. Puffy as it was, the jumpsuit was surprisingly easy to move in, even with his feet sliding on small bits of spaceship: bolts, screws, detached buttons of varying colors, levers, scraps of metal, a package of specialty soaps...

"Here!" The Doctor skidded to a halt by a giant, metal cylinder that lay on its side like a toppled tower. Even on its side, it was at least twenty feet to the top. A gash had been cut into the side about ten feet up, like someone had taken a giant can opener to it. Tubing leaked out like mechanical guts.

The Doctor gazed up at it warily. "We'll need to get inside. The transition's going to feel very odd, though. I think down will be," he tilted his head, "that way when we get inside." He pointed off to the right, along the slope of the cylinder.

The Doctor wheeled his little red wagon a little closer and then dropped the handle. Taking the toolbox, he scrambled up the tubing until he reached the jagged edge of the slit. Once up, he lay down on his side, his feet down in the direction he had indicated before. With a wave at Angel, he threw out his leg like he was taking a sidestep and slipped into the darkness within. Angel heard a crash and a second later the Doctor said, "Nope. Down's the other way. Point your feet the other way when you come through."

Angel approached the cylinder warily and took his time climbing up—he was not going to make a fool of himself in slightly new gravity and a jumpsuit that was more flexible than his brain told him it should be. Up near the slit the Doctor had disappeared into, Angel arranged himself the opposite way the Doctor had and hesitated, peering into the darkness beside him.

_The hell with it,_ his mind told him. _Just go_. And he shuffled in through the crack.

The Doctor's stepping motion suddenly made sense: the floor seemed to appear just below Angel's foot, making him stumble in the utter disorientation. Blinking into the darkness around him, he could see the outline of the Doctor, who was directing a flashlight around a room that seemed much smaller than what the outside indicated it should be. The floor was smooth and appeared to be red plastic. The Doctor stood next to a hexagonal console, where a glass tube reached from its center up to the ceiling.

"It's like yours," Angel said.

"Yes," the Doctor agreed, dropping onto his back and pointing the flashlight up under the console. "This is a TARDIS graveyard."

"So, what, your people just dump your ships here when they break?"

"No," the Doctor said, grunting as he pushed himself farther under the console, "there was a creature who lived here that would lure Time Lords onto this planet and then eat the energy in their TARDIS." His foot kicked to extend his reach. "Alright, see if you can lift the top of the console off now."

Angel crossed the short distance to the console and fumbled for a hand hold. When he found one, he lifted. The metal casing was much lighter than Angel expected, and he accidentally took a few buttons off with the quick upward motion and they clattered into the wiring. He hoped they hadn't been important.

"Something actually lived out here?" he asked.

"A few things," the Doctor said, sliding out and leaning over the newly exposed parts. He held out the flashlight for Angel to take and pointed where he wanted the light directed. "Quite a clever little leach, actually. He kept the planet together and maintained a few people who'd fallen through the universe to get here."

"So where's he now?"

"He found out that I was the end of his food supply so he tried to take my TARDIS. We objected."

_We_. That ship was definitely probably sentient. There was a screech of metal and the Doctor ripped out some piece out of the console. He set it aside by Angel's foot.

"And none of the other Time Lords…'objected'?" Angel asked. He knew next to nothing about Time Lords, but if they were anything like the Doctor, Angel couldn't see why, with all the hundreds of ships around them, one of them hadn't managed to put a stop to it before the Doctor got there.

"Probably," the Doctor said, leaning back into the console and waving for Angel to change the angle of the flashlight beam. "But they were—" he paused, working at a complex bit of wiring before he managed to unhook a small black box. "I think cannibalized is the word I'm looking for."

Angel grimaced. "Guess you got lucky, then."

"I hadn't thought of it that way," the Doctor said in clipped, but not unfriendly tones, pulling out a third piece and setting it next to the others. He dived back into the mess. "They managed to leave a warning. It gave me a head start. And it had a different strategy with me. It wanted to steal my TARDIS, not just eat it. Heists take longer than dinner." The Doctor caught Angel's eyes for a second as he stood up with another piece of machinery. He almost smiled, but then just jerked his head toward a doorway in the back of the room. "We'll see if we can make it to the engine room."

Angel lowered the console back into place and followed the Doctor deeper into the ship. It _felt_ dead. More credence for the TARDIS-is-sentient theory. Beyond that, the deeper they creeped, the more wrong everything seemed. The floors shifted from candy-red plastic to a sickly green metal and then started to twist up onto the walls. Gravity always followed the floor, which meant that on particularly sharp corkscrews, gravity would be pulling in two different directions at once until it settled out into a new "down."

The Doctor paused by every door, not opening it, but pressing his hand against it, like feeling for warmth. Everything creaked or moaned when they touched it.

"So," the Doctor said conversationally as he stood with his hand pressed against what looked like a submarine door, "how's Connor?"

Angel had been floating in a state that was too weirded out to be bored, but too idle to be engaged. The question hit him so hard he reeled, his hand reached out to steady him against the wall.

"What?" he managed through his suddenly dry mouth. The Doctor shouldn't know, _couldn't_ know.

"We've done the bit with the Master, right?" the Doctor said, sounding worried.

"Yeah, but—" Angel faltered. But what? _I made a deal with the Devil, who stole the memories of Connor from everyone who had loved him, and then the whole world for good measure, and that's really why I'm CEO of Evil Incorporated now?_

No. He couldn't say that. Just as much as the Doctor couldn't know.

The Doctor stepped back from the door, giving Angel that concerned look again.

The thing about the Doctor was that he carried his own universe with him. His own rules. His own way of being. And out here, Angel was so far away from everything that the rules—whosever they were—didn't count anymore. They were in a different time, in a different dimension, outside of the universe...

"—But," Angel said again, pointedly not meeting the Doctor's eye, "I erased everyone's memories of him."

"Oh," the Doctor said, making a face like he disapproved of Angel's life choices, but didn't want to be rude and point it out. He tried and failed to cover this expression with a smile. "Sorry. I have a good memory."

Even magic had limits in time and space, Angel reminded himself. It hadn't reached Cordy, had it? There was every chance that the Doctor had simply been too far away the moment that Angel had taken the knife and—

No, right. He wasn't reminiscing. He definitely wasn't panicking. He was in a dead spaceship somewhere outside the universe. Three things he found he consistently had to remind himself about (though admittedly, the last one was a recent necessary reminder).

Angel swallowed uncomfortably. "He's good," he said. "Happy. I checked in on him the other day."

The Doctor watched Angel for another moment. Angel always suspected that the Doctor noticed far more than anyone had a right to and it made him shift uncomfortably under the gaze.

Which didn't really prepare him for the abrupt hug. The Doctor grabbed him just as Angel had looked away, their fishbowl helmets clunking together. Angel really needed to think of a counter to this. Or at least remember to maintain some sort of distance when he ran into _this _Doctor. He was sure the one in the leather coat would not have hugged him.

Nor would he have squeezed Angel's shoulders and then held him away at arm's length and said, "You're a good dad."

_He knows_, Angel suddenly thought with a horrified twisting, sinking feeling. Angel didn't know how he knew, but he must. _I erased everyone's memories of my son_ did not equal Good Dad without any other context. Angel narrowed his eyes skeptically at the Doctor, who suddenly looked more alien to him than he ever had before—which admittedly was not much, aside from the double heartbeat. Either the Doctor had creepy mind-reading powers, or… "What have I told you?" Angel asked slowly. Time traveler.

The Doctor's knowing grin suddenly looked less like an ego trip (which Angel usually translated it as) and a lot more like he actually knew something. "That you're CEO," he said, "but you look miserable. You would destroy the universe for your son, but you had everyone forget him. You're checking on him, but given the year..." the Doctor looked around at the hallway, "that you come from," he clarified, "you've put him somewhere else. So he's happy. You're at Wolfram & Hart because of him. For him," he concluded. "Obviously."

Angel resisted the temptation to derogatorily refer to him as Sherlock Holmes. But it was all—obviously—correct, so there was little else for him to say. Except, "So you know. Don't spread it around—it'd undo it all." Or close enough to undoing it all.

The Doctor signed zipping his lips along the dome of his helmet. "I'm good at secrets," he said, nodding his head down the hallway as he started to walk again.

Angel followed, staring at the back of the Doctor's head as he did. It felt like pulling a thorn out of the palm of his hand, just knowing that someone else knew. Yes, he had a son. And he was happy. Even the bitterness of knowing that Connor was happy now that he didn't remember Angel seemed less painful when there was one other person who knew it.

And this other person didn't think he was entirely wrong for it. The decision had always been justified in Angel's eyes, but to have someone else say it—that he was even a good father for it…

Nope, not reminiscing. In a dead spaceship somewhere outside the universe.

"One more hall," the Doctor whispered as they rounded another corner, "if we don't find it, we're going back."

But as he said it, his hand pressed against another door, he said, "No, wait..."

He touched the knob, slowly turning it until it unlatched with a _click_. The Doctor waved Angel back before he pushed the door open less than an inch and then paused, like he was waiting for an explosion to happen. When nothing exploded, he pushed the door a little more and waited again. Again nothing. He pushed just enough to poke his head through and let out a sigh that crackled in Angel's helmet speaker. "It's solid," the Doctor whispered, pushing the door open the whole way.

Angel wondered what would have happened if the engine hadn't been solid. Did TARDIS engines melt? Evaporate? He followed the Doctor, stepping forward into the blackness of the room beyond.

Inside, smooth, white walls stretched out on either side of him. The space of the room seemed to devour what little light the Doctor's flashlight provided. The Doctor set the toolbox on the ground again and dug about until he found a translucent globe the size of an orange. Giving it a solid shake, the Doctor flung the ball up and as it ascended, it glowed bright and warm, like a tiny sun.

At its smallest, the room could be compared to an airplane hanger, with machinery growing from the floor and walls. Someone who wasn't a vampire might compare it to a jungle, or at the very least, an overgrown, happily innocent forest. But when Angel looked at the twisting mess of organized chaos, he saw a dissected body. Arteries of piping and veins of wires grew almost organically out of metal casings that reminded Angel of organs, connecting everything in an intricate system that was more visceral than technological. Even how very dead it all felt.

Directly in front of them was a misplaced eye. Made of stone instead of metal, a sphere rested in a stone socket, cut by an almost surgically-straight crack like a closed eyelid. Something about the crack gave Angel the impression that it was meant to open, although what it would reveal when it did was beyond him. Four smaller orbs stood at the corners of a larger rectangular frame around the eye, and Angel could guess even less what they were for.

In the very center of the room, the largest part of the engine grew from the floor like a spine, with sleek metal sheeting protecting whatever nerves were inside.

The Doctor picked up the toolbox again and strode past the stone orbs. "We'll leave these," he said with a dismissive wave, like Angel had been considering taking them. "Those were the power converters for receiving energy from the Eye of Harmony. No Eye of Harmony any more, so I've been pulling energy from rifts."

Angel didn't understand most of that, but thought that "Eye of Harmony" was a very romantic name for something coming from a people he had assumed were obsessed with science. Also, why couldn't the Doctor use it anymore? Had his society collapsed somehow? That would explain the scavenging. The inability to get technology that obviously has existed at one time in enough quantities to have a whole graveyard full of ships with it.

It also explained some of the arrogance: perhaps the Doctor was the remnants of some dissolved upper class. Clinging to the tattered remains of a life he'd once known.

"What happened?" Angel asked as he slowly skirted the Eye of Harmony energy-receiving thing. "Energy crisis?"

"Oh, yeah," the Doctor replied as he stared up at the engine. He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and directed it as the side of the metal casing, "the worst." He turned, looking back at Angel. He tilted his head like he was seeing Angel for the first time. "That's right," he said, like remembering something long forgotten, "I haven't told you."

Angel hated that phrase. Innocuous though it was, it usually meant that he hadn't been told something _bad_. Something he wouldn't want to hear. "Told me what?" Angel asked anyway.

The Doctor turned back to the engine. "Where to start..." he pondered. The familiar screech of the sonic screwdriver sounded and a screw the size of a tree branch unwound itself from the side of the engine.

_Huh_, Angel thought, _it never occurred to me that it actually worked on screws._

Another screw fell out and the Doctor pointed to the engine. "There's a crack in the seam here, do you think you can pull off the cover? Bend it at least. I need in there." As Angel approached the seam, the Doctor continued, "There was a war. A time war, if you can imagine a war across time." He undid another screw that might have gotten in Angel's way as he tried to pull the panel off. "It consumes everyone. Everywhere. Always."

"Consumes?" Angel asked, working his fingers against the crack, trying to get purchase. Present tense? He didn't feel like he was being consumed right then, but he had to believe that a Time Lord would be able to get his tenses right.

"Yes," the Doctor said. He waved a hand at the crack. "

Angel's fingers had managed to get some leverage under the seam and he pulled. Nothing happened, so he braced one foot against the side of the engine, reset his grip, and started to strain against the metal again.

"Whole galaxies were swallowed up," the Doctor continued. He walked away, but his radio continued on. "And we had lost. Our final defenses were fracturing, and no help in sight." He returned, a shoved a bar into the crack and pushed at it, adding his own strength to Angel's. The metal started to pull away, groaning angrily as it did.

"And what you need to understand," the Doctor managed to say as he strained against his makeshift lever, "is that when we lost, the things we were fighting wouldn't have stopped. They were hate. They would lick our blood off of their lips and just move on to the next civilization."

The metal let out a scream as it finally curled away from the seam. "Figuratively," the Doctor huffed. "They didn't have lips."

He clapped Angel on the back to indicate a job well done and stuck his head inside of the exposed engine. "Perfect," he observed, and clamored inside.

"So, the President decided that everything would rather die than let that happen. He proposed that we obliterate the physical universe and evolve into beings of thought."

Destruction of the entire universe? Forced evolution into higher beings? Suddenly, the Doctor's egoism made sense. If his species could actually _do_ that… Angel leaned into the crack a bit, squinting in the near darkness at the Doctor's shadowy shape, silhouetted by his flashlight. He was climbing the latticework of pipes that filled the inside the spinal sheath, his feet making hollow _thuds_ with each step.

"What did you do?" Angel asked.

The flashlight wobbled around inside the engine as the Doctor changed his footing. "I—" he paused, muttering, "I suppose there are nicer ways to put it, but..." The light circled around, pointing somewhere near Angel's feet. Angel got the sense that the Doctor was almost hiding behind the light.

"I killed them," the Doctor finished. Angel heard the hidden grief. He'd heard it in his own voice before; there was no missing it for someone like him. "Pulled them and the things we were fighting out of the universe."

The light shifted back up to a dark chunk of machinery hanging amongst the pipes and a long, dark pause filled the air. "I'm going to need you up here for this," the Doctor said after a moment as though they had been discussing their mission of finding spare parts.

Angel stood frozen in the open crack, watching the nonchalance of the Doctor's body movements: a cloak of coping with the incopeable. Angel knew that the Doctor's _ship _was dangerous, but he'd never thought of the Doctor himself as capable of what he'd just claimed he'd done, even to save the rest of the universe. Angel understood sacrifices like that. Though again, he hadn't really seen the Doctor as the type.

"All of them?" Angel asked.

"And the planet," the Doctor said. The light dipped down again and his outline leaned against one of the larger pipes behind him. "Can't go home. Can't refuel. Can't pick up parts. It's the little things that really bite at you. You know, on top of the big things."

The big things. Angel had been assembling the puzzle that was the Doctor for years, only to find that he had been missing a whole box of pieces, which the Doctor had just dumped on top of the now obviously incorrect picture Angel had constructed. Not knowing the Doctor's story had always put Angel off: he didn't like not being able to figure people out. And yet, he hadn't been prepared for the mystery to be simply given up, like the Doctor had just flipped to the last chapter and read the solution.

"Why tell me?" Angel asked.

"Are you going to help or not?" the Doctor asked, letting out a tired sigh. "Don't make me regret telling you."

Angel pushed the rest of the way into the spine and started climbing the smooth pipes up to the Doctor.

"I thought we could be friends," the Doctor answered as Angel climbed. "It's just one of those things you should know about me: Bow ties are cool, I don't like toast, and I'm alone."

Angel's fingers felt clumsy against the metal pipes, and he didn't think it had anything to do with the grey jumpsuit or the slowly-building cold stiffening his joints. The sudden plunge into all the emotions that came with genocide of your own people and the utter loneliness of being the only one of your kind made Angel feel the kind of numb that's thick, weighty. Disjointed.

Things were starting to pull together now. The monastery in Sri Lanka. The Doctor's odd determination to save both humans _and_ aliens during their trip to the moon. The Moment that the Doctor had given him after Connor was taken. _If I could do all of that, Angel, I would not do it for your child because I'd be much too busy doing it for mine._

God.

Above him, the sonic screwdriver was unscrewing things again. The Doctor worked on, and suddenly the fact that he was here, doing something as constructive as engine repairs seemed amazing to Angel. Back at the monastery, he had asked the Doctor if he had any insight on detaching from grief. Angel gripped the next pipe that offered itself as a handhold and tugged himself up. "_Nope,_" the Doctor had said, _"Not really."_

Maybe not grief, Angel thought as he ducked between two pipes, but he clearly had to detach from something to still be functional. _You must be this crazy to ride_, indeed.

Angel appreciated the time the climb up to the Doctor afforded him. What do you say to that? "I'm sorry" seemed so far away from even touching it that it seemed crass somehow. Like Angel's own apologies for his days as Angelus. Some things just couldn't be touched with words.

Angel jumped lightly up to the large pipe that the Doctor was standing on, unscrewing the bolts connecting brackets to a large piece of machinery that reminded Angel of a large, metal heart, with two distinct compartments and all of the tubing that seemed to be entering it from above and exiting below.

Maybe it couldn't be touched with words, but Angel had never been very good with words anyway.

He set a gloved hand on the Doctor's shoulder and could feel the tension. The kind that wouldn't go away no matter how many confessions were made. You simply couldn't predict how someone would react to having something that dark in your past.

"So what do you need me to do?" Angel asked.

The Doctor turned, maybe looking for another, darker follow up to Angel's offer to help.

Angel shrugged. "Because if it's more technical than unscrewing things and heavy lifting, you're going to be _really_ disappointed."

The Doctor smiled, and then, oddly, looked embarrassed. "I need you to climb back down," he admitted sheepishly. "I forgot the toolbox and you'll need a wrench."

"But you _said_—" Angel sighed sharply. "Right, fine. Be right back."

A few minutes later, Angel was back and had been set to work unscrewing the brackets ("Right in your paygrade!" the Doctor had said) that held the (the Doctor had called it a "transolzonerator") while the Doctor assigned himself to the more delicate task of freeing it from the tube veins that connected it to the rest of the engine.

They settled into their work until it became mindless, when the Doctor interrupted the silence with, "So, lawyers, huh?"

Angel grunted in response.

"How many jokes a day do you hear about that, then?"

"Huh?"

"Vampire lawyers. It's like a humor goldmine." The Doctor freed a tube and it went hissing away, coiling like a snake. "Bloodsucking lawyers!" he tried out, laughing at his own bad joke. "What's the difference between a vampire and a lawyer?"

"A vampire only sucks blood at night," Angel said as humorlessly as possible. "Please stop."

The Doctor laughed like Angel had added to his goldmine. "How many vampire-lawyers does—"

"I will throw this wrench at you!" Angel held the wrench up threateningly.

The Doctor fell into a sullen silence—the kind children fell into. Not, Angel thought, the kind of sullen that any self-respecting destroyer of worlds ought to be capable of.

Angel settled back into much less sullen thinking.

The Doctor did stop making vampire-lawyer jokes, but instead he took up humming _Scotland the Brave_ just to fill in the silence. He switched to an aria from _Madame Butterfly_ when he moved from the tubing on top of the transolzonerator to the tubing on the side.

"Friends," Angel said softly into the silence between the next song change. For some reason, in spite of the jumble of adventures that they had shared, Angel had never actually considered their friendship, and certainly without the simplicity that the Doctor had suggested it. Like a child on a playground.

"Of course!" the Doctor said, his voice brightening like the sun moving from behind a cloud. "I think you're pretty cool. I've never been friends with a CEO before."

Probably because he said things like that.

"I don't understand you."

"That's pretty normal," the Doctor said sympathetically.

"No," Angel insisted, although that was probably the most truthful thing the Doctor had ever said. "You can't just say, 'I committed genocide once. Want to be friends?'"

"Ah," the Doctor said, his shoulders slumped.

"Not that we—" Angel tried to amend, but found that that sentence wasn't going to go anywhere worthwhile. "I mean—"

He meant that he usually took years to build up the courage to admit to any details of his life without a soul. He meant to ask if the Doctor had known him for years, and had simply misplaced himself in their friendship (a terrifying thought, but a question the Doctor had already successfully dodged).

This is why Angel didn't talk about things.

"You told me you were evil the first time we met," the Doctor said. He worked his way along a thinner pipe to point at a seam in the metal. "All the bolts along here when you're done with that," he said, moving on to something that looked like a control panel. Angel could hear a smile in his voice as he added, "We must have really hit it off."

"I told you I was evil," Angel agreed, tossing the last bolt in the line he was working on over his shoulder. "I didn't tell you what I did."

"Huh," the Doctor said, pulling the control panel free and burying his arms in the wires inside. "No...I guess you're right. I remember now! You hit me. Not hit it off. I confuse those two sometimes."

Angel rolled his eyes, ignoring the tiny voice in his head that reminded him that he confused those two things sometimes, too. He moved to the seam that the Doctor had pointed out. "You were really irritating," he said, explaining away the punch, and all of the other punches that had followed.

"That's a pretty normal opinion, too."

Angel had to wonder if the Doctor meant in general, or for Angel. Both could be equally likely. After a moment, Angel asked, "When did it happen?"

"A little before I met you," the Doctor said. He pointed to the end of the line of bolts Angel was working on. "Don't undo the last one until we're sure it's not going to fall out and crush us, alright?"

Angel nodded. "And how long have you known me?" he asked.

The Doctor laughed. See? That was one of those things that made Angel want to punch him. "That's a good question," he said. "A really good question that I can't answer right now."

"Why not?"

"Secret Time Lord business."

"You're the only one! You can't _have_ secret business," Angel objected.

"Sure I can," the Doctor said. "It's just me, so it's extra secret. I've elected myself President, too."

If Angel _could_ have punched the Doctor, he would have, but they were too far apart and the web of pipes would have made any kind of punching motion more difficult than it was worth.

"I think I should get to know when it concerns me," Angel grumbled.

"You'll find out eventually, I promise," the Doctor said.

Angel glanced around the piece of machinery at the Doctor, unsure just how concerned he should be. But he let it go and turned back to working on the bolts in silence.

Shortly after that, their work required both concentration and strength as they lifted the heavy machinery out of place, broke open a big enough gap in the casing to get it through, and hauled it back to the console room. There, they made a quick stop to load the Doctor's little red wagon with the smaller parts he'd collected, and then it took a solid twenty minutes just to figure out how to get the engine out of the TARDIS without dropping it in the sudden gravity change, yet quickly enough to avoid any of it bending under its own weight while gravity pushed on the ends in two different directions. After that, it was a labor intensive trek back to the TARDIS over the ground that had frozen over in quickly dropping temperatures while they had been inside of the ship.

And then, finally, they needed to get the heavy engine piece into the Doctor's working TARDIS, whose doors weren't all that wide. That had involved a lot of the Doctor insisting that it would all work out and then him pressing a sequence of buttons that he said would "open the bay door."

As far as Angel could tell, it was the sequence that turned the ship inside out. Or maybe just the sequence that turned reality off for a bit until it was more convenient. Angel tried his best to ignore it and regain some of his strength. The Doctor hadn't been lying when he said that Angel would be carrying "heavy things." His muscles burned and he vowed to work out more, even if CEOing didn't involve as much physical exertion as life-saving.

Even once the pieces had been piled inside, the Doctor had squinted out at the planet that now glistened with ice crystals and said, "What do you think? We might make one more trip…"

"One...more…" Angel sighed wearily. "Yeah, okay. I guess you've got to be able to fly." Or whatever it was the TARDIS actually did.

The Doctor met his eyes; both of them were exhausted, but he grinned, grateful. Then he dashed back out. The final load was more of an exercise in seeing just how much could be packed onto the cart, which, Angel noted, seemed to hold far more than it should. Angel grew used to the Doctor's mumbling to himself crackling through the radio. "I'll need one every 5 decades...no, it'll take too long. I can make my own...oh, a rathion emitter! I never thought I'd see one again."

Maybe it was the loneliness of their surroundings: the cold that was starting to become oppressive even to Angel, who didn't have a body temperature to maintain, the nothing and death and more nothing. But as he loaded the cart with the piles that the Doctor kept dumping in front of him as if he'd just won a shopping spree (which, Angel admitted, he kind of did), he asked the Doctor, who was out of sight but still on the radio, "How do you do it?"

"I've been working on my TARDIS for a very long time," the Doctor said. "And much of it by myself."

"No, I mean all of it. How are you still moving?"

"Oh. That." Scraps of metal clattered through the microphone. "I keep going because I haven't lost everything," he said. A part soared over the mountain of debris at Angel's head. Angel snatched it out of the air and set it with the other parts on the wagon.

"Not to be insensitive, but you kinda have," Angel said.

"Nah," the Doctor said, walking back around with a large chunk of machinery in his hands. He started pulling apart a piece, and then seemed to decide that it wasn't worth the time and just shoved the chunk of machinery at Angel to load on the cart, "not everything. I have a TARDIS. I have friends. _Great _friends who go outside the universe to pull scraps with me. I have the universe to see and people to meet. How could I stop when I have all of that?" He turned back to Angel, hope still sparkling in his eyes. "My fingers just went numb with cold," he said, wiggling said fingers. "Let's get back."

"So," Angel said slowly, "...you are completely insane."

"Yeah. That's about it," the Doctor agreed and started hauling on the handle of the cart, while Angel bent and pushed the end to help the Doctor get it started over a rut.

They'd wandered farther than Angel had thought, and the cart squeaked and rumbled over stones and ship scraps as they walked. They were circling around a particularly large TARDIS when Angel asked, "And the guilt?"

"Check," the Doctor said, leaning into the effort of pulling.

"No," Angel grunted, bending again to lift the back end of the cart so it could make a particularly tight turn between two broken ship bodies. "How do you deal with it?"

"I'm not sure guilt is supposed to be dealt with," the Doctor replied after they found smooth ground again. "It's just telling you that you messed up. You don't un-mess-up. You just keep moving until it doesn't define everything you do anymore." The cart started to move more easily, now. "I'm trying to do things better. I want to be someone who wouldn't ever do that."

Angel was quiet for a long time while he thought about that. He couldn't really disagree with any of it, except that he couldn't see far enough ahead into his future when the guilt might not define him anymore. Until now, he hadn't even thought of the possibility. It was a bit different between them, since the Doctor's guilt came from something he did with a soul, whereas most (but admittedly not all) of Angel's sins were committed without. Angel could at least separate his states of being, where the Doctor would have to come to terms with having been completely himself when he'd killed his own people.

Damn.

"But you _are _someone who would do that," Angel said softly before he could think twice about it. "You can't change the past—only what choices you make in the future."

"They'll just have to be some _really_ good choices," the Doctor said, again, oddly hopeful. Like he expected to. Like he thought he could.

"And in the meantime?" Angel asked. After all, it wasn't like it was good enough to just wait for an opportunity to come along to make the choice to be a better person. Redemption took effort.

"What meantime?" the Doctor asked. "Right now's not too shabby."

Angel nudged the cart over another rut with his foot before he answered and it took much less effort than he'd expected. "Right now, you're not exactly faced with the choice of whether you should commit genocide or not."

"Thank goodness for that!" the Doctor said with such seriousness that it sounded like a joke again.

Angel gave a sharp sigh. "Never mind," he said. One of the pieces in the cart knocked loose as it bumped almost lightly over a rock, and Angel caught it before it hit the ground.

The Doctor paused, turning to eye the piece as Angel set it back into place. "That's not..." he kicked a rock on the ground. It sailed off into the distance. The Doctor stopped, watching it, and his breath in the radio quickened. "That would be the gravity," the Doctor said, his voice panicked. "Faster!"

Angel grabbed the red railings of the wagon and helped push it faster. He suddenly realized how light he felt. "What's happening?" he asked.

"The universe is collapsing," the Doctor explained, shoving a huge pole out of their way. "It's losing mass, and with it, gravity. It means we need to get out of here."

"You've got a time machine," Angel pointed out, breaking into a slow jog as he heaved his waning weight against the cart. "Why couldn't you have landed us less close to the universe's destruction?"

"Any earlier and the planet would be a giant, TARDIS-devouring leech monster. Or even worse, we might run into me!"

Angel had to agree that that _would_ be worse. The TARDIS was in sight, now, and Angel's feet were slipping...not sideways, but _up_. He tried to move faster, but it was like being on ice and the harder he pushed against the ground, the less traction his feet had.

On the other hand, the wagon was moving more on its own inertia, and as they drew closer, Angel suddenly worried about how they were going to get it to stop when they got there.

"I hope you have a plan!" Angel yelled, even though he didn't need to with the radio.

"One that applies to our being about to crash into the TARDIS?" the Doctor asked, slipping a bit as he tried to keep his feet so he wouldn't be run over by the cart.

"Yeah, that's the one I'm worried about," Angel said.

"I'd like to think crashing _is_ a plan," the Doctor said, snapping his fingers so the TARDIS doors opened as they approached it.

Great. Well, with it now being an actual effort to _lower_ his feet to the ground, Angel had little choice but to go along wholeheartedly with it. It seemed that the gravity loss was exponential: Angel had to knock a few bolts out of the way of his head, now.

Angel peered around the Doctor and his stomach knotted in horror: the TARDIS was losing her grip on the ground, too. If they were going to get the wheels over the edge of the doorframe, they'd have to push up off the ground at the last second and hope they'd aimed properly.

The wagon shifted a bit in a way that suggested that the Doctor was preparing for just that. The TARDIS was fully off the ground, now, drifting lazily at a slight angle away from them.

"We have to jump!" Angel said at the same time as the Doctor.

Well, at least they were in agreement about stating the obvious.

Angel readjusted his grip so that he was holding the wagon underneath, and as his feet left the ground completely, and he knew he was out of time. "You aim," he said. "I'll push!"

He gave the Doctor exactly one second to do this, because that's all Angel had. In that second he heard the screech of the sonic screwdriver. With effort, Angel shoved his feet back toward the ground, made contact, and jumped with all the strength he had. The cart shot forward, its own wheels off the ground, and Angel held on for his life, hoping that they were heading straight for the doors of the rotating TARDIS.

He wasn't entirely prepared for it to work—at least, not so well. Like a mouth swallowing them whole, the doorframe seemed to wrap around them and the TARDIS's interior gravity took hold. Angel collided with the back of the cart like he'd fallen into it from high above, and in the radio, the Doctor yelped out as the cart, in turn, ran into him. Everything crashed, skidded and tumbled to a halt. Half the parts from the cart avalanched on top of the Doctor, burying him in his new haul.

Behind them, the TARDIS doors snapped closed.

There was a brief moment of silence and then the Doctor started to laugh, his arms pushing their way out from the pile of parts. "What a close one!"

Angel smiled. He missed the close ones. "Hope it was worth it," he said.

The Doctor swam out of the pile of parts, pulling his helmet from his head and turning to look back at Angel. His smiled faltered, just for a second, and then his expression settled into something more thoughtful. "Yeah," he said, "I hope so too."

Angel pulled off his helmet also and breathed in. The air smelled refreshingly nuanced compared to what had been coming out of puffy suit's recycling circulation system. "Nice aiming," he said, tossing the helmet aside and standing up to unzip and un-velcro the suit.

The Doctor reached into the wreckage around the cart. He grinned and peeled off his own suit, leaving it in the pile of rubble. Taking the steps two at a time, the Doctor flicked several switches on the console and pulled the screen over to himself, but looked over his shoulder at Angel instead of at the screen.

"You know what?" he called down to Angel, looking completely pleased with how the day had gone. "We should stop off someplace nice before I drop you off. As a thank you. Do you like—" he turned back to the screen. His smile faltered and he leaned in, eyeing the shifting circular symbols. He sucked on his teeth.

"What?" Angel asked.

"Fifteen minutes," he read and scampered away and down the stairs to the lower section under the console.

"Until what?" Angel asked, pulling the space suit off of his last leg and dropping it on top of the Doctor's discarded suit. He walked over to the edge of the short drop-off that the Doctor was standing in, staring up at a spot amongst the wires and tubes that hung above him.

"Until the whole place explodes."

"Ah." Angel waited an extra moment just to be sure the Doctor wasn't going to stop looking at whatever was so interesting among the cables. "Then shouldn't we be going?" Again with the stating the obvious.

The Doctor's eyes flicked over to Angel, and he flinched, quickly redirecting his eyes at the spot above him. "The-the-" he stuttered, waving a hand at the tubing above him, "the artron inhibitor: it's...broken. Must have been damaged on the journey here." He reached a hand up, gently touching the part above him. "It would be better to change it out before we took off again."

"And how long does that take?"

"Two hours," the Doctor said without hesitation. "One if you're _really_ good." Something sparked above him. "Half an hour for a genius in a fix."

Half an hour. Angel happily left the math part of CEOing to other departments, but he knew _this_ one didn't add up to their happy, thriving survival. Angel placed his hands on his hips. He looked around helplessly, taking in the brass and green of the room and the piles of dirty parts dumped in front of the door. "Well, can it wait?"

The Doctor yelped in pain as the piece above him sparked again. He didn't answer Angel's question, but his brow furrowed with worry and that said enough. Suddenly leaping out of the pit, he dashed past Angel to dig through the pile of pieces.

"So we're stuck here?" Angel said, trying to hide any panic or anger that tried to bubble up into his voice. Exploded outside of the universe was, actually, _not _how he imagined he would die.

"No," the Doctor said, pulling out the part from the pile. He took his sonic screwdriver to it, pulling off what Angel guessed to be additional parts that the Doctor hadn't bothered to remove when the part was harvested. "We can take off just fine. And it's not broken yet. We can gamble and take off and hope it doesn't break completely. But..."

"But?" Angel prodded, stepping up onto the main floor.

"But," the Doctor continued, "if it fails, it'll kill you."

"And you," Angel added, not wanting to leave the Doctor out of the fun, I'm-gonna-die party.

"No..." the Doctor dashed back past Angel, still tossing off unwanted pieces from the artron inhibitor as he jumped off the short ledge again under the main console, "just you."

Well that didn't seem fair. Angel twisted around, hating how this problem (like so many of his problems lately) couldn't be dealt with by a good, solid, punch. He ducked his head under the glass floor of the main console to look at the Doctor. "Have you tried hitting it?" he suggested. That was how he fixed his VCR. (Gunn had once made fun of him for being CEO of a company that had technology that shouldn't even exist, yet still using a VCR. Angel had then promptly and grumpily moved the device from his office to his penthouse upstairs.)

The Doctor looked scornfully back at him, but looking at Angel made him flinch again. Guilt.

Angel was suddenly dumped into a freefall sensation of being on the other side of a friendship doomed to end in pain.

"But anyway," Angel continued, pushing through the sensation into the rationalizing part of Imminent-Death-Denial, "I'm very resilient. I'm the one that doesn't die from stuff. Being dead already… It's part of the vampire thing. Really, I survived Hell."

"That'd be great if we were going to Hell," the Doctor snapped, grabbing a wrench and slamming it into the part above him (hadn't Angel _just_ suggested doing that?). Sparks rained down around the Doctor. "But if this thing fails, the Time Vortex will flood into the console room. It'll rip you apart."

"And not you?"

"Ohhh," the Doctor drew the word out as he disconnecting several wires, "eventually. I mean, it's not like I can _live_ in the vortex. Time Lords are temporally solid. So..." he grunted and a screw clattered down by his feet. "...I could last long enough for the TARDIS to drop into regular timespace. It's like...fire and a professional diver. Fire doesn't hold its breath. Divers don't breathe water, but they don't die when you dump a bucket of water on them either."

The Doctor stopped working to look pointedly at Angel. "You're the fire in this metaphor."

Angel didn't like fire, as a rule. Vampires were weirdly flammable. "So...let me get this straight: If we _don't _leave in less than 15 minutes, the outside-the-universe explodes and we both die. If we _do_ leave in less than 15 minutes, some mechanical...thingy that's broken won't work, and _I'll_ die."

The Doctor pressed the new-used part up into the tubing. A second later he let out a yell of pure frustration, his arms dropped back down to his side, the part still gripped in his hand. He went still, defeated by the machinery above him.

"Maybe it will work," the Doctor whispered up into the wires and tubes after a few deathly silent seconds. "It's not completely broken, so it could hold." He started mumbling to himself again, pressing his fingers against the bridge of his nose. "It's a minute until we break into the universe and then we emergency stop and drop out of the vortex...that's a minute and ten seconds. It _could _hold..." He stood up, pressing a hand through his hair.

"Do you think it will?" Angel asked. "Honestly?"

"I'd say three to one against," the Doctor replied. He set the part aside and reached back up. "Maybe reinforcing it will get us enough time...although..." He was working quickly again. He tugged off his bow tie and used it to tie something into place. "I wasn't expecting this to break. We probably hit some odd turbulence coming in...now that I think about it, it's probably because this universe is dissolving, which really makes me think that we'll probably hit the same something on the way back out."

In other words, no. Angel nodded numbly, letting the idea that he was going to die sink in.

It wasn't a new experience for Angel, but that didn't mean it was comfortable. His mind would always race to the people closest to him, painting horrifying pictures of them needing him to be there—to save them, to help them, to love them—but he wasn't.

Out here, with that horrible nothing outside the TARDIS doors creeping closer with every second, Angel had nothing. No Wesley or Fred to ask, no Gunn to rely on, no Lorne or Cordy to tell him it would be okay, no Connor to protect.

He didn't even have that lock-and-chain destiny to rely on. Out here, he had no one and nothing. He was alone.

So basically, his only option was to wait and hope that the damn thing didn't break.

He glared at the device in the Doctor's furiously working hands. No, _desperately_ working. Sweat beaded at the Doctor's brow and his hearts were pounding. For Angel's sake. Because, apparently, they were friends, now.

The Time Lord and the Vampire. It sounded like a book of tall tales, only this one would be cut short, since Angel didn't have the kind of immortality that Time Lords did…

Angel looked up. "Doctor," Angel said slowly, "can you make me…" What was the phrase the Doctor had used? "Temporally solid?"

The Doctor shoved more tubing into the device with a frustrated jab. He turned and blinked at Angel. Hope flashed across his face. "That _is_ an idea." he directed the sonic screwdriver at Angel instead of the TARDIS. He eyed the edge of the screwdriver like it had a sign attached to the end. He wilted. "That is almost an idea," he concluded. He jogged toward the stairs, but paused in front of Angel. "I'm going to fix this," he said, almost as determined as he was frightened. As he turned away, he, "I just don't know how..."

"So you can't solidify me?" Angel called after him.

The Doctor reached the console and peered at a screen. "Not in...seven minutes and fifteen seconds," the Doctor said, slamming his hand against the console in frustration. "There just isn't _time_." He pressed a hand against his face. "Think," he said, like he could urge his mind into motion. "Think, think...not enough time to change it out. Can't make a protective barrier. Not enough time to do any sort of genetic mirroring—I'll give it to you, Angel, that might have worked if we had an hour. I mean, it's not Hell, but I bet you could survive it anyway, being dead and all...of course, if we had an hour, I could change out the part." The Doctor slammed his fist against the console.

Something uncomfortable stirred deep in Angel's gut as a notion took seed. He took a step back, his eyes falling from the Doctor above. "Genetic mirroring?" he asked.

"You said it yourself: You need what I have genetically. It's pretty..." the Doctor seemed to get distracted by some of the symbols shifting across the screen and didn't finish the sentence.

_Convenient_, was the word.

In a sick sort of sense.

Angel grabbed the railing of the stairs in front of him to steady himself as this new notion took form, tumbling over old solutions and slamming into beliefs and ethics as it grew, winding its way to the surface of Decision.

"How much time did you say we had?" Angel's voice sounded weak.

The whole TARDIS tipped. If Angel hasn't been holding onto the railing, he probably would have lost his balance completely. The Doctor yelled and grabbed a lever, pulling it down as they tipped. The center column started to move and the takeoff sound echoed around them.

"_None_, the universe is collapsing," the Doctor shouted, dragging himself up to place his hand on a spiked ball set into the side of the console. "Come on, dear," he said urgently, "just hold on for one minute."

In two panicked steps, Angel was up the stairs and on the main platform. He wasn't ready to die. He wasn't ready to leave his family. He wasn't ready for his end to be as a Wolfram & Hart CEO, and not as a hero. And a part of him thought that maybe, as he looked at the Doctor's own panicked movements, that maybe the Doctor wasn't ready for this, either. Not when the solution was right in front of them.

Besides, now Angel knew that the Doctor understood sacrifices.

"Doctor," Angel said urgently. The Doctor turned, and they caught eyes. "I'm so sorry." After all this, Angel had sort of hoped they could have been friends. Maybe that was something the Doctor needed to know about him: that he was alone, too, and for a reason.

The Doctor's eyes always seemed to hold more than they should. More sadness on top of more joy, and now, more knowing. He looked like he understood something; maybe Angel's plan, or maybe something else.

"I'm sorry, too," he said, something like shame touching his expression before he looked away, reaching for the TARDIS controls.

Angel probably wouldn't have to kill him, he thought as he strode forward. He didn't know how much blood he'd need to mimic Time Lord genetics in his own body, but even if he drained the Doctor, he'd regenerate again.

What was that saying about rationalization and the Devil?

The TARDIS lurched again, but Angel managed to maintain his footing this time. He was at the console. He took the Doctor in both hands and turned him around. The Doctor, like all of the people Angel wronged, deserved to be faced while he did it. The ship trembled under them as she ripped them back into the universe.

Angel's fangs slid out; he grabbed a fistful of the Doctor's hair, drew his head to one side, and jerked him forward. Angel noticed, as he did, that the Doctor didn't resist, like he'd known that it was coming.

Angel bit into his neck and drank.

The blood was different: Cooler, more metallic, vaguely fishy, and came with a burning sensation like drinking a gallon of whiskey at once. It poured into his mouth, the double hearts pumping twice as hard so that Angel almost couldn't swallow fast enough to keep up.

Almost immediately, Angel's body reacted. Convulsing, then relaxing in the sudden flood of life in his veins so deeply, it seemed to force his heart to beat just the once and his breaths felt _almost_ necessary. Instinctively, he pressed harder into the Doctor's neck, sealing his lips around the wound so that none of the blood could escape anywhere but into his thirsty mouth.

He began to feel dizzy with the excitement of life; his stomach both full and ravenously hungry at the same time. This was new. Humans filled him slowly, methodically; synchronized with his need. He was built to drink from them. But the Time Lord was everywhere: too much and not enough, and _god_ too much, but in such a good way. Angel didn't know when he needed to stop for his own sake, but he should probably stop for the Doctor's.

Soon.

Ish.

The Doctor started to struggle, a hand pushed weakly against Angel's chest. He breathed out what Angel guessed to be a protest, but maybe it was a warning. A moment later, Time hit him.

It felt like being hit by hurricane winds as they crashed over land and being ripped out to sea at the same time. Amid the gale, he was vaguely aware of dropping the Doctor, of being sent tumbling away, and then the screaming started. There were voices, shouting, explosions, gunfire, deep and piercing silence, all pressing in on him in an ocean of sound. He was suddenly, endlessly weightless. Golden light whirlwinded around him, cradling and ripping and...

With a screech and a crash and a sickening _thud_, Angel hit the ground and everything stopped. He had fallen off of the upper platform and landed in the lower deck where he was bathed in the sickly green and golden glow of the TARDIS.

Although...the light hadn't been golden before, just green. His vision swam and Angel closed his eyes again. Every bit of him ached, from his overworked muscles to his bones to his eyelids, which Angel had previously never thought of as something that _could_ ache.

He lay there in a state of shocked thoughtlessness for minutes—or maybe seconds, it was difficult to tell. When his mind did finally return, it seemed to ache as well, but with guilt.

The Doctor...

Angel opened his eyes and found the world was still spinning. Golden motes like sunspots blinking in front of his eyes. He blinked again, but they wouldn't clear, they just moved and shifted, seemingly clinging to the objects around him: moving along the tubing, flowing down the stairs, and pooling around the outline of the Doctor.

Angel blinked again, realizing that he could see the Doctor though the glass floor of the platform. He had curled onto his side, a hand pressed to the wound on his neck, but blood had seeped through his fingers and had formed a (golden-outlined) puddle of blood on the glass. He wasn't moving.

Angel tried to call his name, but found that his mouth had somehow become disconnected from his will. He shoved at the ground, regaining his feet for a second, only to have a wave of dizziness pull them out from under him again. For a moment, he wondered how much of the sensation of being disconnected from his body was a result of the high from the Doctor's blood. One lingering side effect after most of the power had been used up in surviving the Time-whatever. He couldn't remember what the Doctor had called it; the past fifteen minutes seemed to have blurred together in his mind into a single, brightly colored mess.

His voice returned and he choked out the Doctor's name as he pushed himself up again, searching for the stairs amidst the shifting golden lights.

The Doctor groaned above him. The sound of his boot moved against the glass floor. A muffled _thump_ as he rolled onto his back.

"Doctor!" Angel shouted again, half-falling up the stairs, his feet tripping on the jumble of parts that littered the floor. He made it to the main level and then up onto the platform, where he dropped to his knees next to the Doctor and placed his hand overtop of his, adding pressure against the wound.

"Doctor?" he said again.

The Doctor's eyes opened and he looked up at Angel. A ghost of a smile crept onto his pale face. "Hey look," he said weakly, "we made it."

"Where's your med bay?" Angel asked.

The Doctor's eyes fluttered closed again. "I'm really pleased," he mumbled.

"The med bay!" Angel shouted, giving the Doctor's shoulder a shake.

It made the Doctor wince. "Stop yelling," he complained. "It's down the hall, sheesh. Can't you see… I'm trying to..." The Doctor's head lulled against Angel's hand as he lost consciousness.

Panic spasmed through Angel's chest and he swore. For a split second, he was overwhelmed with indecision: should he stay and keep pressure on the wound or chance searching the endless hallways of the TARDIS? He looked down at their hands and listened. The blood was slowing; its flow more of a trickle than a creek now. It still needed pressure, but he had to _do_ something.

Angel pushed away, fighting off another wave of dizziness, and stumbled for the closest dark hallway. Except the hallway _remained _dark. He ran down it, expecting the lights to come on with his presence, but they didn't. Even with his improved vampire eyesight and the golden, glowy he-assumed-they-were-hallucinations, the hallway ahead offered nothing but pitch blackness. He pressed on for another minute, feeling along the wall for a door handle, but found none.

Angel swore again, turning in hopeless circles, with only the dim light from the console room far behind to contrast the darkness. Even the non-helpful golden glow seemed to be fading away. He slammed his hand against the wall. This wouldn't work. He couldn't navigate this ship with the lights on and a set of written directions: he couldn't _possibly _hope to stumble upon the med bay in the dark.

Abandoning this plan, Angel turned and headed back for the console room, his fingers trailing along the wall as he ran by, hoping against hope that he would just find a door, but none appeared. He reemerged into the console room and started to head back for the Doctor, giving the room a quick once-over in search of anything useful. Maybe the Doctor kept a med kit close at hand?

But that would make too much sense.

Angel cursed again, but then his eyes settled on the only door available to him: the door out.

The Doctor had said that they would do an emergency stop. Logically, they must be _somewhere_. Where, Angel had no idea, but at the moment, he would take what he could get.

Running by the Doctor, Angel dashed to the door and paused for the briefest second to mumble, "please be somewhere helpful." He pulled open the door and stumbled out into the Wolfram & Hart reception area.

"Boss!" Harmony said worryingly from behind her desk. "Is that blood?"

Angel wiped at his mouth with his sleeve. "Harmony," he growled, "call a medical team."

"Because if we're eating peo—"

"NOW!" Angel shouted.

Harmony pulled back, holding up her hands in surrender and then started typing at her phone.

Angel turned on his heel to run back inside, but ran face-first into the TARDIS door. It must have closed behind him when he had run out. He tried to open it, but found that it had no latch: just a keyhole for a key Angel didn't have. He pounded on the door with his fist. The wood shuddered promisingly, but there was something unnaturally unyielding about it.

"Hey!" Angel shouted. People were staring, but Angel ignored them. "Let me in! Harmony, get me a crowbar."

"Right!" Harmony said quickly, but a moment later she said, "So...where do we keep those?"

Angel sighed sharply. "Gunn?" he called. "Wes? _Someone_ who knows _something?_"

Before long they had gathered the whole gang, plus the medical team from Level 4, who kept trying to treat Angel for whatever bruises he had until he threatened to use _them _against the TARDIS door. A crowbar didn't work. Nor did the axe from Angel's office. Or the spell from Wesley. It made Fred's lock picking device explode, scattering shrapnel across the room, which gave the medical team something to do while Gunn suggested that maybe it had a secret password.

Nothing worked.

Wesley was fascinated by it. Stan (or Stu? Maybe Earl), the head of security, could barely contain his excitement at the idea of a wooden box that was impenetrable. Angel was just mad. The Doctor could die, and the ship was just being stubborn, he was sure of it. If the Doctor died, Angel was pretty sure it would be the ship's fault.

Time slipped by. Angel snarled until his 4 o'clock meeting rescheduled. But one by one everyone retired, going home for the night. His friends promised to think up new solutions to try in the morning. Angel stayed put, leaning his arm against the unyielding blue door, his own eyes drooping in spite of his efforts.

It was supposed to just have been a short trip.

"Please, Doctor," Angel said, running his fist into the door one more time. He'd said that they could be friends.

The light on top of the ship glowed and dimmed.

"Doctor?" Angel asked, but his voice was drowned out by the grinding noise of takeoff.

He stepped back as the ship began to fade, and then disappeared as though it had never been there, a few notes of ethereal sound lingering after it had fully gone. Darkness took its place, filling the room with thick silence in the wake of the Doctor's universe of energy.

Angel looked around the empty lobby. Maybe this was one of the things the Doctor should know about him. He had a son. He occasionally ate his friends.

And he was alone.

**The End**


End file.
